Food fight

When the crazoids at Mystery Café Dinner Theatre say their shows are interactive, they’re understating the plainly obvious. Just the other weekend, the current lead actor snapped the back of my date’s bra in greeting; soon after that little encounter, he regaled the woman at the next table with some up-close-and-personal drivel about why her guy is a big fat poopface. The culprit has no qualms about trotting out his libido as a character device, especially around total babes—in fact, I’d guess that his utter lovability has (narrowly) spared him the occasional flirtation with a broken nose (or, at Christmas, a kick or two in the sleighbells).

But that’s Mystery Café for ya. The proprietors are thoroughly aware that we’re all bozos on this bus, and they back it up with their trademark sense of fun amid wildly inflated storylines, wholesale inside jokes and sight gags that sometimes fall flatter than Olive Oyl in prepubescence.

In other words, they have The Good, the Bad and the Udderly Ridiculous, their hilarious Old West spoof mounted in association with Bemily Productions, just about 123 percent down pat.

It likely helps the show that the cast doubles as the wait staff, doling out the delectable main courses at intermission (you get your choice of barbecue beef short rib, barbecue chicken, a grilled vegetable platter and vegetable lasagna, of which my date and I couldn’t get enough; similarly, the chicken enchilada soup is to totally kill for). Whether you know it or not (and you probably don’t), they’re drawing on your impressions as they serve you and set up their cockamamie story about a chili cook-off at the annual Hooter County Fair, with Pete’s Poker Palace as the venue of choice.

The bottom line involves down-home host Pete (co-author James Pascarella); his quarrels with the dastardly Zeke and the milquetoast Sheriff (Gunther Kuisor in both roles); chili expert Pong Ping (Grant Gilbert), whose nationality is up in the air; Jane (Brittany Jeanne Beauchamp), the county’s only blind resident; Vampy von Cartier (Angela Antista), the town tart; and you and me in zany cameo roles. It’s up to us, of course, to figure out who hid the requisite sack of gold and where it is—I guessed wrong by more than a mile, but I plead ignorance. Antista’s death-defying good looks are enough to knock the sense out of Albert Einstein.

Producer Bud Godown is behind the whole loony mess. Part marketing maven, part entrepreneur and part actor, he’s got the goods on the angles that make an enterprise like this successful. Mystery Cafe is in its 19th year, he told CityBeat; that’s a considerable length of time in any event, but it’s more remarkable in that the programming started years and years after modern dinner theater necessarily came into its own (the gas crunch of the 1970s yielded a rush of such venues as producers sought to attract consumers with dinner and a show under one roof).

Director Victoria Velasco, who wrote the piece with Pascarella, wisely holds her peeps with open arms—all this nuttiness, after all, can’t gestate without the cast’s free reign. This show, dressed to a T by costumer Lynn Choplin, is pee-your-pants funny, and the great food is further proof that you’ve come to the right place.     

This review is based on the performance of April 3. The Good, the Bad and the Udderly Ridiculous runs through Sept. 30 at The Imperial House, 505 Kalmia St. $59.50. 619-460-2200, www.mysterycafe.net.

Write to marty@sdcitybeat.com and editor@sdcitybeat.com.